


asleep in the sand (with the ocean washing over)

by hauntedjaeger (saellys)



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Chaotic Neutral Quỳnh, Dream Mysticism, F/F, Gen, Post-Canon, Sensate Shenanigans, headcanon dump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:28:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26655181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger
Summary: Nile’s dreams don’t offer clues, just impressions: a lonesome rain soaked road, a barn at night full of warm straw and soft animal noises, the view through a bus window. She reports to Andy every morning like summarizing yesterday’s news, but she always runs out of words before the thirstiness in Andy’s eyes is satisfied.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache the Scythian/Quynh | Noriko, Nile Freeman & Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 28
Kudos: 146





	1. Quynh

**Author's Note:**

> Suggested listening: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6sJjNov9Ye4HpmV6pvMpCT?si=Rm7g7_mmS7ah38-xGc0F_w

She didn’t have much time to think, inside the coffin. 

She spent half of her time there dead, and the other half dying. And when, on her three-millionth kick, the iron chains finally corroded and fell away and the coffin hinged open, she drowned three more times trying to reach the surface. 

But there, floating face up beneath the stars with her own salt tears joining the sea, her first three thoughts were not words in any language so much as roughly molded concepts, which flooded her mind as thoroughly as water to lungs: 

_air_

_free_

_Andromache_

Andromache. Andromache. The name kept her afloat, towed her to shore, propelled her to stand and to walk and to fight and steal and bargain and bribe her way through an alien world, until--

Now. Sitting in a sedan outside a little house in Portugal. There’s only one light on, in the kitchen. 

“Wait here,” she tells Booker. 

His jaw works like he wants to argue, but he wisely does not. 

She closes the car door soundlessly behind her. Crosses the sparse front yard. The lock yields to her, as all locks eventually do. 

Inside, it is very quiet. 

She passes through the darkened sitting room, avoiding the coffee table that waits to bark her shins. Try as they might, five hundred years could not dull her reflexes or senses; she is nimble in the dark, and there is no one in this room. 

There is someone in the kitchen. 

And yet, the first face she sees when she steps into the light is her own. 

It’s in oil on canvas on an easel, eye level to herself. She is lit in gold and orange, eyes shut tightly and mouth open to laugh, as a hand (not her own) lifts a lock of her hair to comb it. She remembers the heat of the fire that night, the scrape of the stone wall at her back, the sound of the comb in her hair, the softness in Andromache’s eyes--

Booker never dreamed this. Their new one, she never dreamed this. 

In her peripheral vision, someone stands up at the kitchen table. “Hello, Quỳnh.” 

Yusuf of the ready smile and the eloquent word. Quỳnh tears her eyes away from the painting long enough to look at him. He is, of course, unchanged. She has watched him for two centuries through Booker’s eyes and of late through Nile’s, always tinted with their sentiment. 

Now in his presence once more, she mentally reasserts the boundaries of her own time with him. The first dream of his death, looking into the colorless eyes of the man he killed in turn. The night they finally met after the long search, when she and Andromache narrowed it down to one valley, and he and his Nicolò wandered into their camp by chance. ( _Destiny_ , Nicolò insisted. _Cartography_ , Andromache said, shaking her maps annotated with all the landmarks they gleaned from their dreams.)

The day they parted, expecting to see each other again before a month was out, and so not lingering in their goodbyes. 

But this is no time for distraction, for reminiscence. No time for the five mismatched coffee mugs he has placed around the table. Yusuf, too, abandoned her. 

“Where is Andromache?” Quỳnh demands. 

“Very close.” He has never been one to speak in riddles, so she does not look over her shoulder. 

There are other paintings, leaned against the cabinets, and paper on the counter. “What is this?” 

Yusuf takes a breath, weighing his answer. “Call it art therapy. It’s a new thi--”

“I know what art therapy is.” At her feet is a panel that anyone else would assume is an abstract, but she recognizes it at once: the many shades of aquamarine, the diagonal shafts of light. Her view from the bottom of the sea. Yusuf never dreamed that. 

The papers on the counter bear charcoal and chalk pastel. Gesturals, mostly, but here and there an eye. Studies of her necklace, several times larger on the page. One more canvas, recent and unfinished, of a Paris street scene and Quỳnh’s red coat disappearing around a corner. 

“I had nearly forgotten your face,” says Yusuf. “I’m sorry for that.”

“You all forgot me,” Quỳnh bites. Yusuf does not flinch, nor does he protest or make excuses. That is not his way. “And where is the one who reminded you?” 

“You’ll meet her soon.” Quỳnh turns toward Andromache’s voice. She’s here--she’s _here_ \--in the doorway Quỳnh just came through, with Nicolò at her left and Booker, hangdog as ever, at her right. 

Oh, she has changed. 

Quỳnh refused to believe what Booker tried to tell her. Refused the evidence in the dreams. Impossible. Not Andromache. 

Quỳnh was lost five hundred years; she floated under the stars gasping Andromache’s name, and she let it fuel her these last two hundred days, in which she had a great deal of time to think. She will not be denied the fulfillment of all her plans--she will make Andromache understand what it is to be forsaken. 

But her _eyes_. They root Quỳnh in place. 

“Andromache,” Quỳnh breathes. How fortunate she is, to have made it back in time. 

“Quỳnh,” Andromache says, letting it shape her lips into a tiny smile. “Come and sit down with us.”


	2. Nile

_six months earlier_

“Caffè, per favore,” Nile rasps. 

Nicky looks up from the espresso machine long enough to see how haunted she is about the eyes, then makes her a cup as quickly as possible. “Are you okay?” he asks as he hands it over. 

She gulps it all down. _Okay_ is on a sliding scale these days. She slept, but it wasn’t restful. She hurts, as her scalded mouth and throat heal, but she didn’t die. 

She dreamed, but it wasn’t scarring. 

So she nods for Nicky. And then she turns to where Andy and Joe have divvied up the newspaper. “Andy,” she says. “You can tell Copley to stop looking.” 

Andy straightens and turns to search Nile’s face. Nile has been with them for a month, has learned to read the currents beneath Andy’s calm surface. It’s in her eyes now: a tiny spark of hope. 

It feels cruel to feed that hope, when there’s a chance she’s wrong about what she saw. She might only add to years of suffering. But she makes herself say it. “She’s out, Andy. She’s free.” 

Andy stands. Her gunshot wound has nearly healed and she moves better now, but she grabs Nile’s shoulder like she can’t trust gravity. “What did you see?” 

Nile closes her eyes to remember the details. The caffeine hasn’t hit yet, but maybe that’s for the best. She’s still close to that dream-state. “The stars,” she says. She recognized the Big Dipper; Quỳnh remembered when Thuban was the north star instead of Polaris. 

“And the ocean.” Atop it, not under it. Quỳnh felt light enough to run barefoot across the waves. “She was floating on her back.” She drew great gasping breaths, hair fanned about her like Millais’s _Ophelia_. 

Nile opens her eyes, and she can see in Andy’s that that isn’t nearly enough--but Andy knows the limits of the dreams better than any of them. “How did she feel?” she asks. 

“Alive,” Nile says. The fiercest joy, the most bitter vindication, to escape on her own through sheer bloody-minded stubbornness. “She had momentum. She isn’t ever going to stop moving, to be held in place again.” 

Andy lets go of her, sits back down. Nile can’t dream for Andy, but if she could she thinks she would feel the reflection, inverted, of what Quỳnh felt. Shame and guilt at not being there in time. On some level, Andy is bereft again. 

Joe sees this too. “I know you wanted to save her, boss,” he starts. 

Andy drags her hands down her face. “This is better. It’s better that it’s now.” She nods to herself and looks up at Nile. “We’re going to find her.” 

But for all that it’s nearly impossible to disappear in this world, Quỳnh leaves no trail that Copley can find. No reports of a strange woman washed ashore. Andy checks remote boltholes where they used to leave messages when they were separated, but comes home empty-handed. 

Nile’s dreams don’t offer clues, just impressions: a lonesome rain soaked road, a barn at night full of warm straw and soft animal noises, the view through a bus window. She reports to Andy every morning like summarizing yesterday’s news, but she always runs out of words before the thirstiness in Andy’s eyes is satisfied. 

Then the dreams themselves grow scarce, and cease entirely--and somehow, that is worse. 

For over a month she dreamt of drowning every time she slept. She treated it as one more fucked up thing about this life, that her body would wake up rested but her mind would not. Now, a week after Quỳnh’s escape, Nile almost wishes for the drowning in place of this absence. 

She wakes after those empty nights with her heart racing, a sense of wrongness that she has to talk herself down from, as if she slept through an alarm and missed something important. 

Her guilt is bottomless every time she has to meet Andy’s eyes and tell her there is nothing new. She took Nile in, they all did, and they have done nothing but accept all of her, learn her habits and her preferences and her expressions, and Nile can’t even give Andy this much. 

By the fourth dreamless morning, she is desolate with it. Joe takes pity. 

“The connection is only there when both parties are unconscious,” he explains. “So if Quỳnh is on the other side of the world--”

“Or staying up all night,” Nile realizes. 

Joe nods. “No connection, no dreams. When they do come back, you might get a recap episode.”

“It can get… stopped up?” She wrinkles her nose at the idea of dream constipation. 

“Sure. Though I doubt Quỳnh will allow that to happen, at least from her end. She always had the most control out of all of us.”

Nile straightens her back. “How do I control it?”

“Like anything else,” Joe says. “Concentrate. You focus on what you want to get through, and ignore what you don’t.” 

She starts practicing, though it will be days before she has an opportunity to use the skills. She looks longer at certain things: Andy sharpening her axe, for a start, but then Andy feels her watching and stares back until Nile looks away. 

She meditates a few minutes before bed, to put it all in order. She uses lucid dreaming techniques too--mnemonic induction and learning to wake herself up. Even without Quỳnh, after all, she still has nightmares. The pleasant side effect is that she wakes quietly in the night, without disturbing the others. 

Quỳnh’s dreams return when Nile is dozing on the chopper after their first mission together. Nile bolts awake, and Andy’s gaze snaps to her, and Nile starts to describe it, but of course the chopper’s too loud. 

Joe leans across the cabin to hand Nile his sketchbook and pencil. She nods her thanks, and at the first blank page she presses the graphite heavily, intuitively, mapping out light and dark. A damp city street, nighttime, sharp shadows cast by flickering neon lights. A silhouette, walking away--as anonymous and enigmatic on paper as they were in the dream. Quỳnh, or Quỳnh’s quarry? 

She shows it to Andy. Andy holds the sketchbook in both hands like it’s the answer to everything. It isn’t enough, a black and white sketch smaller than a postcard, but it’s all Nile can give her for now. 

Over her sunglasses, Andy’s brows knit and then soften as she works through something. Presently she nods to Nile and gives it back. 

The sketchbook is easier than words, so Nile gets her own, comfortably pocket-size. Every night she focuses on three images from her day. Every morning she wakes and scribbles what Quỳnh showed her. 

Over the next month, the sketches grow more economical, more stylized. They begin to look like preparation for something larger. 

“Joe,” she says at the breakfast table, “do you have any paint?” 

Joe is in the middle of frowning at page six of the newspaper, but his face opens up as he looks at her. “I thought you’d never ask.” He holds his hand out to Andy, and she puts the car keys in it. Joe kisses Nicky’s cheek on his way out of the kitchen. 

“I can just buy some,” Nile says. 

“Don’t you dare!” The front door shuts behind him. 

Nile spends the morning working one of the sketches into a few composition studies, and then after lunch Andy runs her through some knife drills. Joe returns just as Nicky is plating supper. He sets a wooden case down in front of Nile. 

She opens the catches and lifts the lid. Inside are a dozen cloudy glass bottles sealed with corks. One holds a yellowish oil, and another a powdered binding agent. The rest are pure pigment, all at least half-full. “My dude,” Nile says, “this is not what I had in mind.”

“It’s process, not product,” says Joe, taking a forkful of farfalle straight from the pan and getting his hand smacked for it. “You’ll appreciate it more if you start from scratch.” 

She had hoped to launch right into translating the dreams into color… but then, they aren’t going anywhere. “You sound like an art therapist.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“I’m getting acrylics the minute we’re near civilization.” 

Joe puts his hand over his heart like she’s wounded him. 

After supper, they start with ultramarine. Nile works the pigment into a blend of gum arabic, water, glycerine, and honey, while Joe mixes his with linseed oil. As they mull the paste, he recalls dragging Nicky to Venice to stock up on the stuff when it was still made of lapis. 

Despite his feigned purism, he speaks of the synthetic pigments developed over the couple centuries as one of the few truly enlightened aspects of modernity. For the first time every hue is accessible to the layman, and won’t kill people in either the mining or the processing. 

Nile’s first batch is too heavy on the honey and it never dries all the way. She didn’t mull it long enough either, so it clumps unevenly. Still, on the pages of her sketchbook it is as startlingly luminous as an afterimage, beautiful in part because of the hand she had in making it. It _is_ nicer than just buying a tube. 

For the second batch she spends a full evening with the muller and the glass slab, forming meditative infinity loops that melt back into the deep blue pool. 

After blue comes quinacridone gold, a nearly extinct pigment, difficult to mull, transparent and mellow. Then fugitive reds that fade in the sun, and ochres that have been used for this purpose since the only canvases were cave walls. They last over a hundred years, which is when the art world stops counting and calls them permanent. 

She pours them all into seashells and bottle caps and sets them on windowsills to dry--but then of course she has to stop and paint that, because it’s like something out of a Ghibli film, something unexpected and charmed. She remembers how to paint a flat wash from a summer course at the Art Institute. The rest comes through experimentation and YouTube tutorials. 

Her sketchbook holds up all right, but it’s a relief to find watercolor paper in a dusty shop three towns away. She works larger and larger with sable brushes from the nineteenth century that still hold their point. She presses lighter with the pencil and lets the paint work for her. She curses under her breath when she’s so far in the zone that she forgets to reserve white space on the paper. 

She gets cheap acrylics too, and enjoys how quickly she can work with them, how smooth and predictable they are, but she comes back again and again to the paints she made. On idle nights with nothing else to paint, she saturates her paper with clear water and touches only the tip of a loaded brush, watching color bloom across the surface. 

She sketches the others: Nicky reading, Joe stretching, Andy half-sprawled in her chair. She stops short of their faces. To fully commit their images seems reckless, given how careful they are with the traces they leave. If there’s any question later, she will know who’s who by Nicky’s posture, Joe’s rings, Andy’s necklace. She tries to capture them in a handful of brushstrokes, blue and gold. There is an elegance in distilling them to lines, like calligraphy. 

She paints a panel in acrylics, thinned with fluid medium so the wood grain shows through. She builds up glassy blue-green layers, working diagonally to lend movement to a heavy and static subject. Andy looks when it’s finished, and Nile watches her eyes fill with regret. 

Part of her, a selfish part, wonders if Andy sees Nile at all when she looks at her now, or if she sees Quỳnh’s face instead. 

And then Nile dreams of Quỳnh’s face. 

Quỳnh looks straight at her--speaks _to_ her. Half of it isn’t spoken at all, but it reaches her nonetheless. 

“Nile,” says Quỳnh. Her hair is wet, dripping. “Young one.” _Part of me hopes we’ll never meet; I know you so well this way._ “But you will see me soon.” _As every river runs to the sea._ “Tell Andromache: I am coming.”

Nile wakes herself up, gasping, tangled in sheets like she used to when the dreams were about drowning. She gets control of herself and shoves out of bed, goes to the shower and scrubs down violently. 

At the mirror she pauses, almost doesn’t face it for fear that Quỳnh will be there like Bloody Mary. But it’s only her. Nile squares her shoulders and looks into her own eyes, and puts this into the dwelling place she’s set aside in her mind. A place that’s for Quỳnh, yes, but that doesn’t mean she gets to live there rent-free. 

“This is intrusive,” she tells her reflection. “What you did was intrusive. If you disrespect my boundaries again, I will find you and I will _end_ this.” 

She turns away, remembers the last bit of the dream, turns back. She isn’t anyone’s damn messenger. “And you’re not touching Andy.”

By the time the others come to the table Nile is already there, furiously sketching. Now she recalls the faint outline of Quỳnh’s own mirror, and she puts that on the page as well. How strange it must be, to have been out of the world for centuries, then return and find that people no longer use polished silver as mirrors, that they don’t see through a glass darkly, that she has more clarity than ever before. Reflective windows. Security cameras and monitors. Her own face, everywhere, a torment of its own. 

Andy looks over her shoulder, draws a sharp breath, moves away. Joe peeks next, and lets out a soft, “Oh.” 

Nicky sets a plate down in front of her. “Thank you,” Nile mumbles. 

He doesn’t move, so she looks up. “Do you want to spar today?” Nicky asks. 

Does she _ever_. Nile nods firmly, snaps the sketchbook shut, and devours breakfast. 

Out of all the blades they have trained her with, Nile favors the sabre, but this is a longsword kind of morning. She likes the burn in her shoulders after swinging a few times from posta di donna, the leverage she gets with her rear hand gripping the pommel. It’s a cathartic weapon. 

Nicky limits himself to mezani cuts for today. He waits until the fifth time the flat of his blade smacks against Nile’s gambeson before he speaks. “Did she talk to you?” 

Nile turns away so she can get a drink from the water pump. She wipes her face down, too, to delay answering. It’s summer and the jacket is hot. “Yeah,” she says at last. And then, realizing: “Wait, did she ever talk to _you_?” 

“Once.” Nicky looks off toward the hills. “It must have been… 1205? We didn’t share a language yet, but she made herself understood. She and Andy had been looking for us for nearly a century. The world was very large then. We thought it best to stay in one place--a moving target is harder to hit. But Quỳnh got sick of watching me feed Yusuf apricots.” He grimaces. “Even then, she could be very intimidating.” 

A laugh dies in Nile’s throat and comes out as a feeble sigh. “I don’t know what she wants,” she says miserably. 

“I suppose she wants to make us all feel as she felt.”

Nile’s sweat chills. Quỳnh’s pain, her rage. The awful solitude that has not changed since she escaped the coffin. “That is not going to happen.”

“I know,” Nicky says. 

After everything they just went through. Every day she sees herself climbing that tower, finding them strapped to tables in the lab. 

“She is not getting _anything_ from me about where we are,” Nile swears, swinging the sword hard enough that it _sching_ s. 

Nicky waits until the tip is past his knees before he moves closer. He puts one hand on Nile’s shoulder and he doesn’t say anything. 

Nile feels this settle between them. 

In the afternoon she drives into town, to a grocery store. Apricots are in season; she brings home four. 

Nicky knows exactly what she’s about. When Nile finishes slicing them, he makes sure she has a good view of Joe eating a piece, adoringly, from Nicky’s fingers. Nile smiles, savoring the taste. 

Whether it’s because of the mirror talk or the apricots, Quỳnh simmers down after that. The dreams are only seconds long, more impression than image. Which is fine, because as much as Nile wants to guard her mind against leaking their location, she also doesn’t have the patience for Carmen Sandiego bullshit. 

The next time she gets anything recognizable, it’s Millais’s _Ophelia_. Quỳnh is looking at it in a book, or on the Internet, or else she viewed it in person at the Tate. Wherever she is, she lingers a long time on the image. 

Nile undertakes an experiment. Quỳnh’s dreams have a salt scent and a faint burning at the back of the throat. It’s useful as a signifier to cue Nile’s lucidity in the dreams. 

In the kitchen, Nile opens spice jars and breathes deeply of them, thinking of the _Hamlet_ production she ran lights for in her senior year. _There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. There’s fennel for you._

The night after that, the salt scent is overpowered by sandalwood and jasmine. Violets. Pansies. The cool touch of glass on the inside of Quỳnh’s wrist. A line of bottles on a narrow shelf in front of a mirror, where warm brown eyes look back at her. 

Nile lets it play out and she hovers in the warm blackness between dreaming and waking. What could they accomplish, with more practice? If she and Quỳnh were on opposite sides of the world, with an hour or two of overlapping sleep, would they develop an untraceable and nearly instantaneous method of communication? Could they coordinate missions? If they went long enough without meeting, would the connection spill over into their waking hours? 

Even in sleep she feels giddy with a momentum she recognizes as half Quỳnh’s. They would be unstoppable. It would be a new world. 

In the morning Andy gets up from the table after breakfast and smacks Nile lightly on the back, the signal to follow her. Nile marches out behind Andy and Andy’s clanking backpack, turning due east from the house for about half a mile. In the woods Andy halts at a rock that looks like any other rock. She consults a brass compass and a yellowed piece of paper, then turns left and counts out forty paces. Nile watches her unfold a shovel from her backpack and start digging. 

At no point does she ask for help, but Nile nudges her and takes over when she gets winded. Another six inches into the soil, the shovel strikes metal. 

They clear the dirt away and hoist up a footlocker, painted army green. There’s no lock. Andy pries the lid up, and Nile breathes out like she’s been punched. She isn’t sure what she expected, but this much gold seemed almost too obvious--and somehow, still unbelievable. 

Andy scoops out a handful of coins and, after considering, a little velvet bag which she passes to Nile. It’s too lightweight for coins or jewels. Nile opens the drawstring. “Are these black pearls?”

“Yeah.”

They’re not smooth, which means they’re not cultured, which means they’re old, which means they’re worth a shit ton of money. “You had a pirate phase,” Nile accuses. “The three of you had a pirate phase, and I was born too late.”

“It wasn’t a great time to be alive,” Andy reassures her. 

Nile stares at the footlocker. “Do you have a cache at every safehouse?”

“Almost all of them.”

“Andy. You’re richer than God.” That gets a very small smile out of Andy. “I mean it. You’re so rich that I should want to eat you.”

“I’ve never been guillotined,” Andy muses. She checks another bag, adds some coins to it, and holds it out to Nile. “You should start a cache of your own.”

And what, plant it in a field? But Nile doesn’t break character. “This,” she says, cradling the bag to her chest, “this is why people worshiped you.”

Pockets full, Andy rolls her eyes. 

As much as Nile wants to keep coaxing smiles out of her, to have a conversation that’s not about fighting or survival or Quỳnh, she has to ask. “Are we going somewhere?” 

Andy covers the cache and stomps the dirt down. “Seems like time, don’t you think?”

“I guess.” Nile understands how they operate--how they have to operate. Staying here through the summer was already a risk, taken only so Andy would have time to recover. 

Still. “Does the new place have air conditioning?” 

“Don’t get soft on me now,” Andy says, but the words don’t match the fondness in her eyes. 

* * *

Nile came into this life with her dog tags and her necklace and her fists. By the time the summer ends, she has those, her phone, a few changes of clothes, a pair of stun batons, an antique cavalry sabre with a newly forged blade, a bag of gold and gems worth tens of thousands of dollars (and, she discovers later, the map to the cache tucked inside), a sketchbook, a growing collection of paintings, and a rattling cigar box full of paints. 

All this she packs. She puts most of it in the trunk, but when it’s not her turn to drive, she paints in her sketchbook and on scraps of paper that fit in the lid of the cigar box. The landscape turns from green to gamboge, and for a full day and a half that is all she has to show Quỳnh. 

Even Copley doesn’t know where the new (old) safehouse is, though he can reach them when there’s work. The morning after they arrive, Nile goes with Andy to a market in the city. They find a gold buyer, and Andy emerges with a fat roll of paper bills that she sticks down her boot. Enough to last them a while, even though she got less for the gold by weight than she would have for the individual coins, from the right buyer. 

As they move on to buying groceries, Nile stops to admire a bolt of fabric, cochineal red shot through with gold embroidery. She runs her fingers over its pattern for a long time and holds it up to the sunlight. Andy waits on her without comment. 

The dry landscape gets Nile into charcoals and chalk pastels. A pile of newsprint sheets accumulates in one corner of the living room, laden so heavily with black and with color that they smudge at a touch. The paper itself is fragile and almost decadently large, which compels Nile to work more free and raw. The fact that they won’t last is an opportunity to get at something deep, the purest expression of what she sees. 

She throws herself into it for a month, neglecting everything else except hygiene, food, training, and dreams. She goes to sleep with stained fingers. 

She dreams a foggy early morning. The sound of breaking glass. Flaking plaster walls. A carafe of water. 

Quỳnh’s control is absolute, her attention to detail immaculate. Nile is there in that moment, Nile is _Quỳnh_ , water in her mouth, a pistol pointed at her face. Deathly calm. 

Nile tells herself not to wake up, not for anything. She isn’t sure she could if she tried; she is anchored in place. 

So she takes it in, the silence, the tension, until it ends with the two of them still at an impasse, and Nile wakes in a curiously peaceful way. The traces of Quỳnh’s calm, perhaps. 

It’s still night. She gets out of bed, sits at the table, puts her head down on her arms, and sleeps again. 

In the morning, she wakes to the others watching her. Nile straightens, vertebrae popping. She doesn’t want to see their faces, so she rests hers in her hands. “Quỳnh has Booker,” she sighs. 

All is quiet for a long time. Joe breaks it. “Define has,” he says. Nile drops her hands and stares at him. Joe gazes flatly back, arms folded. Neither Andy nor Nicky will look at her at all. “Are they bar-hopping, or is she drowning him?”

Nile leaves them there and goes outside. 

She has been treating this like a game, instead of the danger it is. She has treated Quỳnh like a psychic penpal, an accomplice, a muse. But Quỳnh is wounded--Nile feels that in every dream as clearly as a bullethole. She is wounded beyond healing with sweet smells and thoughtful images. She is from a different time and she has seen, through Nile’s eyes and Booker’s and her own, how many worse things they can endure than death. 

Nile doesn’t hold the others’ wariness against them, after what Booker did. But she told him _No man left behind_ once, and she means to live by that. She could take the car, solo the drive with breaks for sleep. She could get him out and drop him someplace else, she’s confident of that much. And if she faces Quỳnh in the process, they will both be free of the dreams. 

Unless, of course, that’s exactly what Quỳnh wants her to do. _As every river runs to the sea._ Maybe she’ll arrive and find Quỳnh isn’t there at all; she traced Nile’s dreams and in her absence she is coming for Andy. 

Joe finds her leaning against the stone wall as the rising sun warms it. Nile keeps her eyes closed. “When you’re ready to come back in,” Joe says after a while, “Andy wants to make a plan.”

“I don’t think I should hear it.” She would be a liability. 

“I think you should.”

Nile breathes in. “Andy told me she gave up looking for Quỳnh.” In the midst of everything else that happened that day six months ago, could that have made it through in Nile’s dreams? Could Quỳnh have heard those words from Andy’s mouth? 

“We all did,” Joe says softly, and Nile opens her eyes. “We believed she was dead, truly, but even if she had been…” His mouth twists. “It wasn’t right to leave her down there.”

“You would never have found her.” Seven feet of iron in all the Atlantic… even with twenty-first century technology, it would have been impossible. In that first month Copley searched surviving records of ships hired by the church, called in favors to buddies with sonar, and still found nothing. 

“Maybe. But that isn’t the point. What Quỳnh feels now, she has a right to that. And whatever the consequence is--”

“We’ll face it together,” Nile tells him. 

He meets her eyes. She studies him and the deep compassion he still holds for a woman he hasn’t seen in five centuries, for whoever she is now after the water and the rage. Nile caches that for later, so Quỳnh will see it, too. Joe nods his thanks. 

They go inside. Andy hands Nile a mug of coffee. 

They get to work. 

* * *

Once again, her bag is packed. 

Paints and sketchbook, her phone, clothes, passport, most of the wad of liras from the market, a prepaid debit card, one stun baton, and one pistol. Everything she needs if things go wrong, everything she has in the world, minus a too-conspicuous sabre. She wishes, as she hefts it all, that it was weightier. 

In the kitchen, Joe sets out the paintings. “You need any help?” Nile asks. 

“Want to gas up the genny?” He nods to a can of diesel on the counter. “And you can have another look around.” 

Another look seems redundant. If Quỳnh isn’t already on her way after seeing the safehouse last night, the plan is probably a bust. But Nile nods, and she takes the can outside. 

Most of their safehouses are fundamentally the same. Three rooms at most, electricity if they’re lucky. They let places crumble to avoid attention: cracks in the walls, sometimes leaks in the ceiling. (They need to get Copley on some new real estate, for Andy’s sake if nothing else. When all this is done, maybe they can focus on that.)

Antiques everywhere, present company included. A kitchen table, always with four chairs, and the means to make coffee if nothing else. 

Here at the Sierra safehouse in Portugal, though, there is also an outbuilding--hardly more than a shed. Inside it are the generator and a woodworking lathe. This is crucial. The lathe is recognizable. The moment Quỳnh mentions it, Booker will know. 

Nile observes it again while she tops up the generator. 

There is a shovel in the corner. She takes it outside to the edge of the scrub behind the house, sinks it into ochre dirt. The handle’s rough wood bites her palms, but she barely feels it. 

When the hole is a foot deep she drops her miniature cache inside and covers it over. She _will_ come back, and if she doesn’t, gold will be the least of her worries. 

She replaces the shovel, and when she reaches the front of the house the others are there. Andy has her bag. “Ready?” Nicky asks. 

Not even a little. Nile nods. 

Andy shrugs off the bag and passes it to Nile. She puts her hand on the back of Nile’s neck and keeps her there a minute, eyes solemn. 

Joe gets the car door for her, pats the window lightly once she’s inside. Nicky drives, and Nile twists in her seat to watch Andy and Joe, not waving but also not going back inside yet. For once, she looks only for herself, until the car turns a corner. 

Nile faces front again. She doesn’t need to say how much she hates this--Nicky sees it and says, “I know.”

It’s a hundred miles to Porto. She spends most of it with her eyes closed. 

At the curb outside the hotel, Nicky says, “Check-out time is eleven, so I’ll meet you then.” Nile says nothing, but she can’t ignore Nicky’s eyes on her forever. When she turns, he adds, “This is where I am obliged to tell you not to worry about us.”

Nile forces her jaw to relax. “It’s not right for me to hide.”

The plan hangs on the idea that Quỳnh is like a river whose course can be changed, and not like the rising waters that will come for all of them in the end. The plan flies in the face of everything Nile swore to do. She wanted to face this with them, to take it to Quỳnh, to not give her anything. 

“Nile, you are not hiding.” Nicky doesn’t force a smile, doesn’t attempt to be anything but grave. “You are in reserve.”

She tries to draw some strength from that. They are optimistic, not foolish. And she agreed that the dreams are a strategic advantage at the top of a painfully short list of strategic advantages, one that should be maintained as long as possible. Until they’re sure. 

Nile takes a breath and opens the car door. Nicky touches her shoulder briefly. Nile gets out and watches him drive away. 

Porto is beautiful. It would be an amazing place to paint, if she were in any other state of mind. She checks into the hotel; the desk clerk exchanges most of the liras for euros. 

Nile waits out the afternoon in her room with the curtains closed. She watches hours of television and comprehends every fifth or sixth word. As evening settles, she orders room service--a meat stew and a glass of wine. She misses Nicky’s cooking. 

The realization hits her like a fist: she is truly alone for the first time since Andy gave her the car outside Copley’s place. For a minute she’s in danger of crying. The awful solitude. Quỳnh got her wish after all, because Nile feels as she felt. But she gets it under control, swallows down her wine. 

They’re counting on her. 

At ten o’clock she takes two melatonin pills. Anything stronger might disrupt her sleep cycles too much to dream. 

This is the first time in six months that she has had to fall asleep in a room without three other people breathing softly in it. She checks the clock just after midnight and tells herself to get it together, pass out already. If anything happened to the others, this is all riding on her. For their sake she has to sleep. 

She doesn’t dream until much later. 

She is lucid enough that at first, she fears the plan failed. Quỳnh didn’t go to the Sierra safehouse; she went to Val d’Argent. Why else would she be looking at the Rodin by firelight? 

But--no, that’s not bronze, it’s living, breathing flesh. 

No, no, nope. Wake up. Wake _up_. 

Nile wakes up. She is still so steeped in Quỳnh’s happiness, her relief and her love and her joy, that it is an act of will to be pissed off. But Nile has been working a lot on her willpower, and she wills it. She wills it hard. 

She puts on fresh clothes and checks out of the room. Uncaffeinated and hungry, she downloads a rideshare app and taps in the number from the prepaid card. 

She apologizes to the man who picks her up for the long drive out of the city. She tucks a couple hundred euros into his cupholder to compensate for the lost rides, and the driver cheerfully puts on music and doesn’t attempt conversation. Nile sits back and tries not to look as angry as she is. 

It was foolish to imagine that she, brand new and inexperienced, could have the kind of mental control necessary to keep certain things from reaching Quỳnh through their connection. 

But Quỳnh, thousands of years old? Quỳnh who dreamed of Andy and Lykon and Joe and Nicky and Booker before she dreamed of Nile? Quỳnh, who crafted entire conversations on a timed delay, like chess by mail? 

Quỳnh could have made a damn _effort_. 

The car stops outside the Sierra safehouse behind a sedan she doesn’t recognize. Nile tips in the app, thanks the driver, shuts the door behind her. 

She stops in the yard because the driver is gone but there is a persistent mechanical sound. 

The door to the shed stands open a crack, and Nile finds Booker inside, stooped over something on the lathe. 

She proceeds to the house. She doesn’t quite slam the door open, but she sure doesn’t tiptoe. The living room is empty and she dumps her stuff there, strides to the kitchen. 

“Nile!” Joe greets. He’s cooking eggs. Nicky nurses coffee and a book at the table. 

“Hey,” Nile says. “Where are they?” 

“They spent the night in the woods.” Joe presses a mug into her hands. 

Nicky watches her carefully. “So, you didn’t see…”

“Oh, I saw,” Nile tells him. “Saw a pair of horny, old--”

Joe coughs. 

“Women,” Nile finishes, and turns. Andy is there in the doorway. She looks tired, but less tired than she’s been, and far more satisfied. Her expression is its usual resting murder face, but her eyes are dancing. 

“You’ve got leaves in your hair,” Nile says. Andy smiles, and doesn’t make a move to take them out. “Where’s your lady?”

“She took a walk.” Walk of shame, more like, but that’s not the kind of joke that would mean anything to somebody who has no shame. “Are you going to drink that?” Andy adds, proving it. 

“Yes,” Nile says shortly, and takes it away to where she has line of sight on the front door. 

Andy gets her own coffee and sits down. “We have something for you,” Nicky says, sliding an envelope toward her. 

Andy opens the flap. “A Eurail pass?” 

“ _Two_ Eurail passes,” Joe says. “Ten days of travel over two months. Monaco, Genoa, Zurich, even Stockholm if you want.” 

Nicky must have picked them up after he dropped Nile off. Optimistic. Thoughtful, too, because if last night was any indication, Andy and Quỳnh are going to be intolerable. 

Andy isn’t impressed. “You want to get rid of me, you just have to say so.” 

“Boss,” Joe protests. 

Booker comes in then, carrying two low stools, unvarnished but sturdily made. He looks better rested than the last time Nile saw him. Which isn’t much, but it’s something. “Hi, Nile.”

“Hey, Book.” She makes room for him to get the stools through the doorway. Booker sets them down to the left of Andy, and leaves one open between them when he sits. 

Andy silently shows him the envelope. 

“A honeymoon,” Booker observes. 

That softens Andy, a little. Joe, always pleased to be understood, plates Booker’s eggs first of all. 

Andy says, “You know if I’m away for two months, it means Nile’s in charge.” 

The hell it does. Nile couldn’t think of anything to do with her riches except bury them, and Andy wants to leave her the _team_? 

Before she can argue, Joe says, “I know,” and gives Nile a wink. And despite herself, Nile is already thinking about it. 

They can get a lot done in two months. 

The latch rattles. Nile stands straighter. 

Quỳnh is dressed all in red, down to the matching lip stain. Carmine, actually. It is without a doubt her color. 

She hesitates at the door. In all the time Nile has spent feeling what Quỳnh felt, uncertainty was never in the mix, but it is now. She can see it on Quỳnh’s face. 

Nile wonders if it’s done now, if the sight of each other at the far end of the room will end the dreams. Or do they have to be closer? Around the table, perhaps, like the first night in Goussainville. 

Quỳnh moves closer. Nile can feel the others waiting. 

What can be said to someone who has been inside her head? To someone who will always have a place there, though she has stepped out of it and into the flesh before her? To someone whose face Nile knows almost as well as her own now? 

“Hello, young one,” says Quỳnh in a voice light and sweet. And she puts both arms around Nile, tight as a lock. Nile sets her coffee aside before it spills. 

Quỳnh smells like sandalwood and vanilla and campfire. The wool of her coat is soft and warm where it touches Nile. 

And if a little salt water leaks from her eyes, well, they are in the right company for that. 

Quỳnh releases her, touches Nile’s cheek once, goes to the table. Nile watches her take the place between Andy and Booker. She looks in the envelope when Andy hands it to her. “First class seats,” she says appreciatively, and she reaches up to take a leaf from Andy’s hair. 

Andy turns to Nile, nods toward the last seat and the waiting food. But Nile stands a minute longer to look, because they may never all be in the same place again. 

The five oldest people in the world, plus Nile. Or, tallied another way, the only five immortals in existence, plus the world’s oldest woman. 

Like anything else, it won’t last. Booker will go home, Andy and Quỳnh will travel, and someday after that Andy will be gone. Someday, no matter how much she looks while she can, Nile’s memory of Andy will be faceless--a gesture, a posture, a handful of lines. The page that bore them will be long gone. 

But she will remember sitting down at Andy’s right, the last piece in a circle of people with so much still unsaid, unhealed, unfinished. She will remember Andy passing her the salt shaker. 

Long after all of them are gone, she will hold the spaces they left.

**Author's Note:**

> Cheers for reading! I'm on Tumblr @hauntedfalcon if you want to come yell with me about The Old Guard. 
> 
> This fic was graciously betaed by @iwritesometimes. Any remaining errors are entirely my own. 
> 
> The title is from Jeff Buckley's "Dream Brother".


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